Climate Justice

The Institute’s Climate Justice Project, based in central Vermont, brings the critical and reconstructive outlook of social ecology and our years of experience with organizing and direct action, into local, regional and national campaigns to address the global climate crisis. Our focus is on dissecting root causes and advancing democratic, community-centered alternatives.

A central goal in recent years is to support the continued evolution and increased unity of grassroots campaigns in Vermont and throughout the Northeastern US to address the underlying causes of global climate disruptions. Even though many people throughout our region appreciate the severity of the emerging climate crisis and politicians generally acknowledge the problem, fossil fuel interests continue to push to expand their operations and infrastructure while undermining sensible measures to reduce energy use. Frontline communities throughout our region are standing up to industry plans to build more pipelines and transport oil over train lines. New alliances are emerging with a resurgent student movement, progressive elements of organized labor, and rising grassroots movements for racial justice.

The project’s main accomplishments since its founding in 2007, include:

Established and supported the Climate SOS network, bringing together activists and critically-minded scientists to explain and demonstrate progressive opposition to market-oriented false solutions to reducing carbon pollution. Climate SOS offered a consistent, environmentally-centered voice challenging the proliferation of carbon markets that were supported by many mainstream environmental groups and the Obama administration. We challenged the proliferation of biofuels and biomass energy as false solutions to the climate crisis and organized interventions at two events in New York City — a UN seminar during the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference and a major corporate carbon trading conference in 2010 — among other activities.

Contributed our extensive experience with Vermont Town Meeting organizing to 350Vermont’s two-year resolution campaign to prevent the pumping of oil from Canada’s tar sands through an aging Vermont pipeline, as well as a statewide Town Meeting campaign to shut down the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

Helped sustain a strong working alliance of grassroots Vermont organizations committed to climate justice, joining with 350VT, Rising Tide VT, the Vermont Workers Center, Just Power (local landowners challenging a proposed Champlain Valley fracked gas pipeline), and several student groups from across the state. We were centrally involved in organizing a Northeast Climate Justice Gathering (with a parallel arts convergence, titled The Make) in northern Vermont in August 2014 and the Northeast Climate Organizers Summit in western Massachusetts (with more than 150 participants coming from Montreal to Baltimore) in April 2015. We participated in and provided organizational support for a regional and national day of action vs. expanded fossil fuel transport by rail and pipelines.

Communicated social ecology’s distinct contributions to the emerging climate movement, drawing upon 40 years of experience advocating for renewable energy, challenging environmental business-as-usual, and advancing a revolutionary vision for the ecological renewal of society.

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The Symbiosis Research Collective will be speaking at the ISE Annual Gathering this weekend - read their excellent prize-winning article Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid here:

"Our aim in this essay is to channel our struggles against oppression and domination into a strategic approach toward building real utopias—to transform the poetry of Occupy into the prose of real social change. Both concrete and comprehensive, our proposal is to organize practical community institutions ofparticipatory democracy and mutual aid that can take root, grow, and gradually supplant the institutions that now rule ordinary people’s lives.

This next system we imagine is a libertarian ecosocialism grounded in the direct participation of citizens rather than the unaccountable authority of elites; in the social ownership of the economy rather than exploitation; in the equality of human beings rather than the social hierarchies of race, gender, nationality, and class; in the defense of our common home and its nonhuman inhabitants rather than unfettered environmental destruction; and in the restoration of community rather than isolation. Above all else, our aim is to lay out a framework forcrafting such a society from the ground up—to, as the Wobblies declared, build the new world in the shell of the old." ... See MoreSee Less

Our first online course Ecology, Democracy, Utopia was a great success! In response to high demand we are now offering a self-directed course featuring the same video lectures, readings, and discussion forums but without the fixed time commitment of a weekly seminar. This allows for more flexible pa...

"Bookchin was an advocate of an eclectic form of environmentalist anti-capitalism. In "Ecology of Freedom" (1982), he argued that man’s destruction of the environment is the result of his domination of other men, and only by doing away with all hierarchies – man over woman, old over young, white over black, rich over poor – could humanity avert ecological and economic collapse. In "The Rise of Urbanisation and the Decline of Citizenship" (1987) and "Urbanisation without Cities" (1992), he proposed "libertarian municipalism" as an alternative to representative democracy and authoritarian state-socialism: directly democratic assemblies would confederate into larger networks and eventually topple state power. His 24 published books had earned him admirers such as Grace Paley, Noam Chomsky and Ursula LeGuin (who based her novel "The Dispossessed" in part on Bookchin’s early work)..." ... See MoreSee Less